At the Left Edge : Fronting in Medieval French Embedded Clauses

Abstract

The purpose of the dissertation is to reassess the composition of the left edge of embedded clauses in Medieval French by paying particular attention to configurations commonly analysed as “Stylistic Fronting”. In this respect, several issues have been discussed controversially in the literature: the necessity of a ‘subject gap’ , the relation between V2 and “Stylistic Fronting” with regard to embedded clauses, the influence of fronting configurations on information structure, the syntactic analysis, and the question of the trigger of this phenomenon. For this purpose, data from a corpus of narrative juridical material (remission letters) of the 14th and 15th century are evaluated in order to provide an extensive description of different configurations at the left edge of relative, comparative, and other subordinate contexts from a structural and a functional point of view. Based on these results, the present study provides a novel analysis of “Stylistic Fronting” in Medieval French which is argued to be an instance of Verum Focus Fronting.